“I am Police Constable Paul Crick, and this is Police Constable Peter Emett. You phoned the station this morning?”
“Yes.” Bob Harris got to his feet. “I want to charge this man, Hamish Macbeth, with assault.”
“Which is Mr Macbeth?”
Hamish stood up as well.
“Well,” said Paul Crick, “if you two gentlemen will jist step outside.”
“You can use the lounge,” said Mr Rogers.
He ushered the small party across the hall.
“Tell us what happened,” said Crick after he had closed the door of the lounge on Mr Rogers. “We’ll begin at the beginning. Your name is Mr Robert Harris, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“Your address?”
“Elmlea, South Bewdley Road, Evesham.”
“Aye, that would be in Worcestershire.”
“Correct.”
“Job?”
“Double-glazing salesman.”
Crick turned to Hamish. Hamish knew he would need to tell them he was a policeman.
They would probably haul him off down to the station. The very idea that one of their own had been involved in any misdemeanor was enough to make them more harsh than they would be towards an ordinary member of the public.
The door opened and Doris and Miss Gunnery stood there. “You must not listen to my husband,” said Doris. “Hamish was protecting himself. My husband attacked him.”
“You bitch!” roared Bob Harris.
“I heard the whole thing, as did the other residents,” declared Miss Gunnery. “Mr Harris had been keeping us awake by shouting at his wife.”
Crick looked at Hamish. “Is this true?”
“He tried to punch me,” said Hamish. “Yes, I was defending myself.” He knew this to be true. He had felt a great wave of satisfaction when his own punch had connected with Bob’s nose.
Crick flicked his notebook closed and turned to Bob. “Before you go ahead with this complaint, sir,” he said, “you’re not going to get very far wi’ it if your ain wife is going to get up in the sheriff’s court and say it was your fault.”
“And the rest of us,” said Miss Gunnery.
“The hell with the lot of you,” roared Bob Harris. “You Scotch police are so damn lazy, you just don’t want to investigate anything.”
“You’d better watch your mouth,” snapped Crick. “Do you want to proceed with this charge or not?”
“Forget it, forget it.” Bob pushed his way roughly past his wife and Miss Gunnery and left the room.
Crick and Emett turned to Hamish. They were remarkably alike, being quite small for policemen, and both with sandy hair and pale-grey eyes. “Don’t be so handy wi’ your fists in future, Mr Macbeth,” said Crick.
They both left. “That was verra good of you,” said Hamish to Doris, “but he’ll never forgive you.”
“Never forgive me, never forgive me,” said Doris tearfully. “Well, he can add it to the mile-long list of things he’s never going to forgive me for…breathing being one of them.”
She buried her face in Miss Gunnery’s thin shoulder and began to sob.
Hamish walked out quickly. He was weary of the people in the boarding-house and homesick for Lochdubh. He did not return to the breakfast room but collected Towser and headed along the beach, moodily throwing stones into the sea.
At last he returned. He saw, as he approached, the small figure of Doris Harris hurrying off in the direction of the village. When he went in, the boarding-house was silent. Not a sound. He settled Towser in the bedroom with a bowl of food and a bowl of fresh water and went out again, this time towards Skag, but keeping a wary eye out for any of the other residents so that he could avoid them.
Outside a musty shop that sold second-hand goods of the kind that no antique dealer would want was a wooden stand filled with paperbacks. He selected a couple and walked out of the village to a grassy bank at a bend of the river, sat with his back against the sun-warmed wall of a shed and began to read to fight down a feeling of dread. There was every reason to be afraid that something nasty was going to happen at that boarding-house containing such combustible material. The day was sunny and pleasant and he concentrated on his reading to such good effect that he had finished two books by tea-time. Reluctant to return to the boarding-house for another nasty high tea, he went to the fish-and-chips shop and, armed with a paper packet of fish and chips, he walked to the harbour jetty and ate placidly, relaxed now, beginning to think about his dog and realizing he should really return and give Towser a walk.
He crumpled up his fish-supper paper and threw it in a rubbish bin and strolled to the edge of the jetty and looked down into the receding waters. The harbour jetty thrust out into the river Skag just below a point where it flowed into the North Sea. The tide was ebbing fast. At low tide, the foot of the jetty was left dry, with the river running between sandbanks to the sea.
He stared idly down into the receding water. It was a lovely, calm late afternoon, with a sky like pearl. Children’s voices sounded on the still air and seagulls cruised lazily overhead.
Bob Harris came suddenly back into Hamish’s mind and he felt all his old dread returning.
And then, as he looked over the edge of the jetty, a distorted face stared back up at Hamish. He had been thinking about Bob Harris, cursing Bob Harris, so that at first he thought that the dreadful man had stamped his image on his mind. Then, as the water sank lower, he saw lank hair rising and falling like seaweed, he saw the way pale bulbous eyes stared up at him with an expression of outrage.
He climbed down the ladder attached to the wooden jetty and dragged the body clear of the water. Although he desperately tried every means of artificial respiration, he knew as he worked that it was hopeless. Bob Harris was very dead and had probably been dead for some hours.
A man peered over the jetty and shouted to him. Hamish told him to fetch the police.
Hamish turned the body gently over and parted the damp hair. Someone had struck Bob a savage blow on the back of the head. He sat down on the wet sand and stared bleakly out at the receding water. There was surely no hope that Bob had got drunk and fallen into the water. This was murder. But still, he thought suddenly, he could be wrong. Perhaps Bob had fallen over and struck his head on something. But there were no rocks and no sign of blood on the piers of the jetty. Of course, it depended on the time he had fallen in. If the tide was high and he had struck his head on some part of the jetty structure, then any blood and hair would have been washed away.
He heard the approaching wail of a police siren. There would be no hope now of concealing his profession.
Soon he was surrounded by policemen and then forensic men and then arrived Detective Inspector Sandy Deacon, a small, ferrety man with suspicious eyes. Hamish patiently answered questions about the finding of the body, of what he knew about Bob Harris, which was very little. Yes, he was the man who had punched Harris in self-defence.
“Odd behaviour for a police constable,” said Deacon sourly. Hamish requested that he be allowed to return to the boarding-house, as his dog needed a walk.
“No, you don’t, laddie,” said Deacon. “Policeman or not, you’re our prime suspect!”
¦
Deacon, who came from the nearest town, Dungarton, had found out after one phone call to Superintendent Daviot that Hamish Macbeth had recently been demoted from sergeant, had also recently broken off his engagement to a fine and beautiful lady, and was rather weird.
So Hamish sat and fretted. An office in the village police station had been turned over to the murder inquiry as his ‘prison’. He had to sit there, patiently answering questions fired at him by Deacon and a detective sergeant called Johnny Clay. He repeated over and over again that he had spent a solitary day, and no, he did not have any witnesses.
It transpired from a pathologist’s preliminary report that Bob Harris had been struck on the head, possibly with a piece of driftwood, for scraps of sea-washed wood had been found embedded in the wound in his scalp. He
